The Heirloom Kitchen Garden Fall  Report – submitted by Allison Pearson

The Heirloom Kitchen Garden—Part 3

In part 1 of this 3-part series, from back in February, we penned our hopes and dreams for the yet-to-be installed Heirloom Kitchen Garden at the Great Smoky Mountains Heritage Center in Townsend, Tennessee. For the Tuckaleechee Garden Club (TGC), the Heirloom Kitchen Garden is a significant commitment, but one our club unanimously supported because of the need for historic gardening preservation.

We honor those who settled this area, especially the women who cared for the kitchen gardens to feed their families and provide herbal medicines to heal their loved ones. Are we up for the task? Can we work this garden in the late summer heat of East Tennessee with no performance wicking fabrics, herbicides, insect repellant, or power tools? We hope so! Unless the weeds completely overpower us, we promise to provide an honest assessment of our successes and hardships we experience along the way in our Fall Volunteer Gardener update.

The Heirloom Kitchen Garden yielded a bountiful harvest for the TGC. In summer, we harvested potatoes, corn, and beans. Beans were picked for drying and stringing. Ears of corn dried indoors for later shelling and grinding for corn meal for winter. In early fall, pumpkins were picked and dried for cooking. Sweet potatoes were harvested, and our birdhouse gourds are curing on the vine. For our ancestors, nothing from the garden went to waste—even the spent plant materials.

To demonstrate the process of harvesting and storing corn plants for livestock feed, the corn stalks in the Heirloom Kitchen Garden were harvested and stacked on the now-empty bean trellises for drying in “fodder stacks” or “shuck stacks.” Now that the garden harvest is complete and our first year of the Heirloom Kitchen Garden is done, it is time to reflect on our work for the year.

We started with an overgrown field and turned it into many special things. We found two incredible leaders, dedicated gardeners, and strong women to lead our efforts. Club members Debbie Dickie and Diane Rohtert co-chaired the Heirloom Kitchen Garden, with Debbie as our expert on medicinal herbs and Diane serving as our vegetable garden leader. Debbie describes one of her favorite successes as “we saw how much the visitors that stopped by appreciated what we are doing and shared some of their stories of gardening and using herbs for medicine.”

We formed a valuable partnership with the Great Smoky Mountains Heritage Center who provided outstanding social media and print public relations for the Heirloom Garden and our club. We held one of our National Garden Week events, Mornings in the Garden, at our Kitchen Garden with over 100 visitors, and 15 club member hosts in period dress discussing heirloom vegetables, flowers, and medicinal herbs. From this success, we continued hosting Mornings in the Garden every Saturday morning throughout the summer.

The garden generated interest in our club, inspiring us to develop new membership recruitment materials and new members. We gardened the hard way—in dresses and bonnets, with basic tools, all organic, no pesticides or herbicides. We battled insects the old-fashioned way, picking them by hand. Perhaps, most importantly, we honored our ancestors who had to grow food to survive, whose only medicine was what they grew, yet they still found the beauty in flowers.

Now that our Heirloom Kitchen Garden lies dormant, like most gardeners, we are dreaming big for next year. We applied for grants to fund reproduction historic tools, as well as much needed signage for the garden. Diane Rhotert is focused on researching how Appalachian settlers dealt with insects, such as bean beetles, as well as techniques for treating plant diseases.

The Heritage Center has big plans as well. They are installing an historic cantilever log barn at the garden, with plans for a corn crib. Tuckaleechee Garden Club is committed to our efforts in historic gardening preservation with the Heirloom Kitchen Garden for 2023. And, yes, we did survive gardening in historic dress in the summer heat of East Tennessee!